Thursday, July 3, 2014

Damon Linker puts the Hobby Lobby decision in perspective on The Week.

Where once the religious right sought to inject a unified ideology of traditionalist Judeo-Christianity into the nation’s politics, now it seeks merely to protect itself against a newly aggressive form of secular social liberalism. Sometimes that liberalism takes the relatively benign and amorphous form of an irreverent, sex-obsessed popular culture and public opinion that is unsympathetic to claims of religious truth. But at other times, it comes backed up by the coercive powers of government.

That’s how the Hobby Lobby case needs to be understood: as a defensive response to the government attempting to regulate areas of life that it never previously sought to control … From advancing an ideological project to transform America into an explicitly Catholic-Christian nation to asking that a business run by devout Christians be given a partial exemption from a government regulation that would force it to violate its beliefs — that’s what the religious right has been reduced to in just 10 years.

Andrew Sullivan notes the broad advance for marriage equality, the widespread availability of birth control still provided by the ACA and spreading legalization of marijuana and adds:

And overall, this battle has been decisively won by secular liberals and their allies (who include many religious people as well). What’s really being done here is negotiating the terms of surrender.

Quotes of Note

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